Mark Knopfler comes home

Dire Straits lynchpin performs a career-spanning set a short swim from his old stomping ground

“I’ve been thinking about this place all day,” mused Mark Knopfler incongruously. The character-free O2 Arena is not somewhere you’d want to think about for longer than it takes you to find your way out. In fact the reason for Knopfler’s musings was the grotty tower block where Dire Straits first got their act together 40 years ago in Deptford, “ just a short swim away”.

As he
reminisced about his Deptford days spent lying on a beaten-up sofa endlessly
strumming and picking away on his guitar it was clear that for him these were
the happiest days of Dire Straits. Their subsequent ascent to superstar status
in the greed-soaked 80s became an unfolding nightmare.

He’s
still strumming and picking away. Now he’s doing it in the company of hand-picked
highly accomplished professional musicians. The fact that he’s doing it in the
kind of arena he used to shudder to play with Dire Straits show that it wasn’t
size or popularity that was the issue; it was the hype, expectation and
pressure. Now he can play his own music at his own pace. The fact that he can
sell out the O2 followed by a couple of nights at the Royal Albert Hall is the
validation of success on his terms.

Nearly half tonight’s show comes from Knopfler’s last two albums, Privateering and the new Tracker which in a revealing sign of the times is being given free to ticket buyers. Almost as revealing is that several songs have gained in stature from the CD versions, like Corned Beef City and I Used To Could enlivened by some great pub-piano playing and the jaunty Skydiver with Ruth Moody on backing vocals. You could quibble with the crowded sound – at times there were four guitarists strumming away and two keyboard players is arguably excessive for Knopfler’s roots-based songs – but you couldn’t complain about the quality of anyone’s playing.